April Topic: Aff. and Neg.

WE have known race riots, draft riots, labor violence, secession, anti-war protests, and a whiskey rebellion, but one kind of trouble we’ve never had: a language riot. Language riot? It sounds like a joke. The very idea of language as a political force — as something that might threaten to split a country wide apart — is alien to our way of thinking and to our cultural traditions.

AFFIRMATIVE:

RESOLVED: ENGLISH SHOULD BE THE OFFICIAL NATIONAL LANGUAGE OF THE UNITED STATES.

By Terry Hatch

Topic Analysis:

I really think that this is going to be a hard position to sell as the affirmative. As Meredith and I were discussing the topic, she told me that she was glad that she didn’t have to write about why a narrow-minded policy should be adopted. To some degree I think she is right. However, I think there is a little room for the affirmative when it comes to the wording of the resolution.

I want everyone to learn one word and learn it well: FEDERALISM… This is going to be the strongest argument for the affirmative. Make the argument that although the “National” language of the US will be English, each state under federalist principles have the ability to consider themselves “bilingual” or “multilingual” and therefore establish other official state languages. The best example of states adopting a policy under the federalist principle is Hawaii who has English and Native Hawaiian as their official languages.

The problem with not having a “national language” is that it opens up the possibility that we have hundreds, if not thousands of languages dominating our governments and public facilities. The United Nations, although has hundreds of members, speaking dozens of languages, only has 6 “official” languages. [http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment090500b.shtml]

This brings us to a weighty issue: Should populations (cities, counties, states, or the like) whom are dominated by a particular language be able to establish record systems, which may have to be accessed by larger entities such as the State Government or Federal Government, which are in a language other than English? The answer is no. Continuity requires that records, especially when kept by the federal government be in a particular language in order to make them accessible to all who work there.

It is precisely because the resolution says “national” that the affirmative has any ground. National, as I said above with relation to Hawaii, doesn’t exclude state and local governments from allowing bilingual and multilingual record keeping, however, in a nation such as the US, where there is a clear majority and many places such as the mid-west and mountain states, where there is not a lot of diversity, the establishment and promotion of a second language, or more than two languages, creates incentive for backlash.

The question that has to be brought to the attention of people is: Do people believe that there is a national language or that there should be one?

I bet you that the answer, in an overwhelming majority, would be yes. Not just yes to the idea that there should be an official language, but yes that an official language is ALREADY established.

Another advantage that the affirmative has is playing the “this is America” card. If you have a conservative judge or live in a conservative state, chances are you are going to have an exponentially increased chance of winning. Immigration, English only, and issues alike to those, incite pretty established views.

Now I by no means believe what I am going to tell you to say or argue next, however if you want to win a round use this next argument. I guarantee for very conservative states, and very conservative people they will agree with you whole heartedly, hell my grandfather would…

Ask in cross fire whether you believe it is right for immigrants to come to this country and take away American jobs, and then claim discrimination when they are: a.) not hired b.) want special accommodations or c.) require additional costs in order for them to be employed. Most people, who are “right” leaning, would say that is BS.

Now if you think that argument is a little too consertvative for you or you have a moral dilemma when thinking about being xenophobic then I think that this argument is your winning argument. Say that a national language would just apply to Federal codes, policies, records, and federally employed individuals. This means that everything outside of federal control could be bilingual, but for the sake of continuity (as I said before) the official language would be English.

Tips of the Month:

Read up on something called the:
Title VI Prohibition Against National Origin Discrimination As It Affects Persons With Limited English Proficiency… This will be brought up by anyone who has done their research- it will provide a firm basis for negative arguments as well- because we all know you have to prepare for both sides.

Second, do not bring up “procedural” arguments in rounds as Meredith suggested last week in her article. It turned out a disaster and many rounds were determined by arbitrary intervention by judges rather than how the debate actually went down. If you understand procedurals because you have done policy, fine- but I suggest steering clear of them for clarity sake. The topics chosen by the NFL, on face give enough ground to both teams, taking the easy way out, or what you think is the easy way out, may not necessarily pay off in the end because the judge may not give a damn about “counterplans.”

That last thing being said… THERE CANNOT BE COUNTERPLANS IN PULBIC FORUM… Why you ask??? There can’t be counter plans because there is NO PLAN in the first place. At best, the negatives advocacy is a counter advocacy, not a plan… Please remember this. It was indescribably frustrating to hear teams complaining about how unfair it was to have other teams providing counter plans, all that I could think was, HOW CAN THERE BE A COUNTERPLAN IF YOU AREN’T ENDORSING A SPECIFIC PLAN??????? It doesn’t make sense does it???? I don’t think so either.

Hmm, the last thing I will say is be funny. Use good examples/analogies when dealing with issues; it gets the judge on your side. I was on a panel for the National Qualifying Tournament here in Oregon. One of the teams was talking about how “just because we need a health insurance that is universally applied to all, that doesn’t mean we are going to turn into the hammer and sickle USSR, with communist ideals and a totalitarian dictator as a leader… But we are leaning that way, not because of the insurance that we are endorsing as the affirmative, but because of the President who is basically a totalitarian dictator.”

With the panel that they were talking to, they made an accurate and intelligent decision. They made the negative argument, that having universal insurance was socialist and was just a slippery slope to communism (I hate those words too, but hey used them), look ridiculous.

You rounds and your arguments can be light-hearted, because there is a balance. The thing to remember is getting the judge to like you is 90% of the debate. If the other team is rude, and the judge doesn’t like them, the probability of them winning the round (not argument wise but ethos wise) is substantially decreased. Winning the argument doesn’t always translate into a win in the round. I have, like many other debaters learned that many times over. Rounds are very multifaceted; they require argumentation, delivery, and appeal among other things. Don’t get wrapped up into just one aspect of the debate, step back and examine what has to be done as a whole- it is sure fire.

Articles for the Affirmative:

Clinton’s War on English Continues
DOJ’s 30 tongues.
By Jim Boulet Jr., executive director, English First——-jboulet@englishfirst.org

http://www.englishfirst.org/13166/13166nr12501.htm

n January 10th, the Department of Justice left the incoming Bush administration a real stinker of a housewarming gift: a “Departmental Plan Implementing Executive Order 13166.” The bottom line: Canada has two official languages. Thanks to this document, the U.S. Department of Justice now has at least five and perhaps as many as 30. (You can read the complete document for yourself.)
Executive Order 13166 (issued on August 11, 2000) redefined “national origin discrimination” to include a failure to provide both written and oral translations in any person’s choice of language. Each federal agency was ordered to produce a compliance plan.
While on its face, this DOJ “Departmental Plan” claims that “[t]he purpose of Executive Order 13166…is not to create new core services,” it imposes a remarkable number of new and costly requirements on every government agency within the DOJ’s purview.
First off, the DOJ plan states that “To the maximum extent practical, limited English proficiency shall not act as a barrier or otherwise limit access to vital information, i.e., information publicly available in English as to when, where, or how to access benefits or services from [any Justice Department office or agency].”
Such a requirement covers considerable ground, since a lack of English proficiency is precisely a barrier to accessing information in an English-speaking county. (So too is a lack of Spanish proficiency a barrier to accessing vital information in Mexico. A lack of proficiency in Italian is a barrier in Rome. Life is that way on planet Earth.)
This “barrier” will fall, thanks to Bill Lann Lee, Bill Clinton’s recess appointment as the Justice Department’s Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights (in defiance of both the Senate and the Constitution).
Those who are upset by appliance instructions in three languages will love the new documents they receive from Justice Department agencies: “Where documents are available in languages other than English, the English version will include a notice of such availability translated into every language in which the document is available.”
How many languages are being talked about? A minimum of five:
Complaint Forms. All complaint and Privacy Act release forms published by [the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division] for distribution to individuals for the purpose of soliciting information about or allegations of possible violations of federal civil rights statutes will, at a minimum, be translated into any of the five most common languages spoken in the United States…. Based on the 1990 census, these languages would include Spanish and Chinese.
However, the possibility exists of documents in at least 15 languages:
In addition, the Division will evaluate the feasibility of translating complaint forms into any of the 15 most commonly spoken non-English languages in the United States…. Based on the 1990 census, this would include (in addition to Spanish and Chinese) Korean, Vietnamese, and Russian.
Or even 30 different tongues:
Outreach Materials. All written materials…that are designed to explain individual rights, complaint procedures, or other information vital to understanding and exercising federally protected rights, will, at a minimum, be translated into any of the ten most common non-English languages spoken in the United States…. Based on the 1990 census, [this would] include Spanish, Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese. In addition, the Division will evaluate the feasibility of applying the…translation standard to the thirty most commonly spoken non-English languages in the United States based on current census data.
This DOJ document boasts that: “Several outreach brochures are already translated into Spanish and one targeted to potential victims of national origin discrimination is scheduled for translation into 12 languages other than English.”
Documents are merely the beginning. A visit to your local government office will soon feel like a visit to the embassy of a foreign county or a border outpost station in Europe, since all signs will soon be in at least three languages:
Where signage within a publicly-accessible duty station or facility maintained or administered by a component (other than a point of entry into the United States) is provided in English, it will also be provided, at a minimum and as soon as reasonably practical, in the two most common non-English languages spoken in the area served by the duty station or facility where, based on available data, more than 25% of the people within that language group speak English less than well.
A footnote continues: “‘Available data’ includes but is not limited to language and demographic census information pertaining to the area or region served.”
The signs and the documents in a multitude of foreign tongues includes the Internet. Those who visit the United Nations website are given a choice of six languages in which to proceed . Thanks to this DOJ plan, you will soon be able to enjoy your choice of languages on Justice Department web sites as well:
Where documents are available for viewing or downloading through a component webpage in languages other than English, a tag indicating such availability in each of the languages will be included on each webpage.
Individuals who look like they are LEP — people like Linda Chavez for example — can expect to be greeted in Spanish even if they speak nothing but English and their families have been part of the United States for generations:
Finally, regardless of the form used to file a complaint, the Division will respond to the complainant in the appropriate language other than English where Division officials have a reason to believe that the complainant is an LEP [Limited English Proficient] person.
The DOJ plan also lays the groundwork for new debates in America’s federal courts:
[T]here may be situations where a component’s own interests justify the provision of an interpreter regardless of whether the LEP individual also provides his or her own interpreter. For example, where precise, complete and accurate translations of information and/or testimony are critical for law enforcement, adjudicatory or legal reasons, a component might decide to provide its own, independent interpreter.
Just think — dueling interpreters in a case filed by an FBI agent. This not an academic question. In the trial of two Libyans accused of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing of a Pan Am jumbo jet, the defense attorneys have argued that their clients are the victims of “poor translation.” While the trial proceedings, conducted in English, were translated into Arabic, the translation was not verbatim but rather an interprtation.
The most fascinating aspect of this document is that it suggests that the Clinton Justice Department consulted among itself on this matter and invited only extreme anti-English groups to make comments prior to the issuance of this astounding document:
[The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division] sponsored a Stakeholder Conference held on November 14, 2000, in Washington, D.C. At that conference, . . . representatives of national and regional advocacy organizations representing LEP populations offered their views on the implementation of Executive Order 13166.
Invitations to confer with Justice Department officials never reached groups with a pro-assimilation stance — groups like English First for example. English remains the language of opportunity in this country and LEP people know that even if the government doesn’t. Perhaps our invitation was lost in the mail.
This DOJ program for multiple-language services is untouched by the Bush Administration’s 60-day freeze on Clinton’s federal regulations. The Bush administration would do well to deep six Executive Order 13166 and the Justice Departmental Implementation Plan it has produced long before the cooling-off period has passed.

More Translations than the U.N.
It’s no way to run a hospital.
By Jim Boulet Jr., Executive Director English First

he United Nations has but six official languages. Thanks to the Clinton-Gore administration, the Maine Medical Center, based in Portland, now has nine official tongues and counting.
Under a July settlement between the Maine Medical Center (MMC) and the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Health and Human Service (HHS), the Maine Medical Center must post a “Interpreter Availability Sign” to be “printed at least in English, Farsi, Khmer, Russian, Serbo-Croatian (Cyrillic and Roman alphabets), Somali, Spanish and Vietnamese.”
There is more to this settlement. Hospital personnel must be “inform[ed] that MMC’s policy of providing in-person and telephone interpreter services to LEP [Limited English Proficient] persons is not limited to languages in which [the Interpreter Availability Sign] and other documents are printed.” In other words, anyone who arrives at the front desk claiming to speak any language in the world has an unlimited claim for translation services.
In fact, the Maine Medical Center is to “always have in place policies and procedures . . . designed to enable effective communication with LEP persons, in languages they can understand, in MMC’s programs and activities, during all hours of their operation, at every MMC location covered by this Agreement.” Clearly, any attempt by the hospital to impose a rational limit on translation costs will invite further litigation.
The mandatory multilingual requirements apply even to “classes concerning . . . weight management.” The organizers of “religious services or spiritual counseling provided at MMC” must also offer translations or alternative programs on demand.
Precisely how many languages a particular minister must speak in order to be allowed to comfort a dying member of his congregation on hospital grounds awaits further clarification from HHS.
The Maine Medical Center now must also practice affirmative action on the basis of language, as though it were located in Quebec:
MMC shall consider fluency in English and one or more other languages spoken by LEP persons residing in its service area as a positive job qualification when selecting or assigning staff who have patient contact responsibilities.
Imagine the job-assignment headache for the personnel office trying to comply: “Hilda must work overtime on Saturday night because we expect more Farsi speakers to arrive, while Jeremy gets Sunday morning because we expecting more Russian speakers. And we need to hire Doctor Yee, whose Spanish is better than Dr. Gonzales’s.”
The most pernicious portion of this agreement is that it holds the Maine Medical Center responsible for the accuracy of all translations:
When MMC staff have reason to believe that an interpreter from a professional agency, a telephone interpreter service, its bilingual staff or MMC’s interpreter list is not qualified or properly trained to serve as an interpreter, or is hampering effective communication between MMC staff and a LEP person, MMC shall obtain another interpreter.
If a staff member does not speak language being translated, precisely how is he to evaluate the accuracy of that translation? The short answer is, he can’t. But there will be plenty of personal-injury lawyers who will be glad to “help.” Picture the hapless emergency-room nurse being grilled on the witness stand: “Why weren’t you aware that the instructions you were giving were translated into Cantonese rather than my client’s native Mandarin?”
This extreme approach to language rights is not just Maine’s problem. On August 30, President Clinton interrupted yet another foreign trip to issue a statement commending the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) “for being the first federal agency to respond to Executive Order 13166.”
Executive Order 13166 declared that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act creates a right to government services in the language of one’s choice. As interpreted by Assistant Attorney General Bill Lann Lee, Executive Order 13166 means:
A federal aid recipient’s failure to assure that people who are not proficient in English can effectively participate in and benefit from programs and activities may constitute national origin discrimination prohibited by Title VI.
The truly frightening part of this radical redefinition of national-origin discrimination to include language choice is that it may well apply to every other law which uses the term “national origin.”
According to the Center for Equal Opportunity, as of August 30, “national origin” appears 343 times in the U.S. Code and 922 times in the Code of Federal Regulations. In addition, many state and local anti-discrimination laws mimic federal terminology.
This means that one day you may well get a call from a government agency threatening a costly lawsuit because the Danish version of your firm’s employee handbook was inaccurate. You too will be offered a “Voluntary Compliance Agreement” similar to the one signed by the Maine Medical Center. Such an agreement will be as “voluntary” as the Godfather’s “offer they can’t refuse,” and enforced in the same gentle fashion.
Evidently, it wasn’t enough for the Clinton-Gore administration to get America involved in the Balkans. They have decided to Balkanize America.

Websites for the Affirmative:
http://www.us-english.org/

Background Information:

http://www.umich.edu/~mrev/archives/1996/4-10-96/english.html

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/JWCRAWFORD/engonly.htm

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/JWCRAWFORD/langleg.htm

SHOULD ENGLISH BE A LAW???

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/97apr/english.htm

Language is tearing apart countries around the world, and the proponents of “Official English” may be ready to add America to the list.

by Robert D. King

wE have known race riots, draft riots, labor violence, secession, anti-war protests, and a whiskey rebellion, but one kind of trouble we’ve never had: a language riot. Language riot? It sounds like a joke. The very idea of language as a political force — as something that might threaten to split a country wide apart — is alien to our way of thinking and to our cultural traditions.
This may be changing. On August 1 of last year the U.S. House of Representatives approved a bill that would make English the official language of the United States. The vote was 259 to 169, with 223 Republicans and thirty-six Democrats voting in favor and eight Republicans, 160 Democrats, and one independent voting against. The debate was intense, acrid, and partisan. On March 25 of last year the Supreme Court agreed to review a case involving an Arizona law that would require public employees to conduct government business only in English. Arizona is one of several states that have passed “Official English” or “English Only” laws. The appeal to the Supreme Court followed a 6-to-5 ruling, in October of 1995, by a federal appeals court striking down the Arizona law. These events suggest how divisive a public issue language could become in America — even if it has until now scarcely been taken seriously.
Traditionally, the American way has been to make English the national language — but to do so quietly, locally, without fuss. The Constitution is silent on language: the Founding Fathers had no need to legislate that English be the official language of the country. It has always been taken for granted that English is the national language, and that one must learn English in order to make it in America.
To say that language has never been a major force in American history or politics, however, is not to say that politicians have always resisted linguistic jingoism. In 1753 Benjamin Franklin voiced his concern that German immigrants were not learning English: “Those [Germans] who come hither are generally the most ignorant Stupid Sort of their own Nation …. they will soon so out number us, that all the advantages we have will not, in My Opinion,

History teaches a plain lesson about language and governments: there is almost nothing the government of a free country can do to force its citizens to use certain languages in preference to others.

be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious.” Theodore Roosevelt articulated the unspoken American linguistic-melting-pot theory when he boomed, “We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house.” And: “We must have but one flag. We must also have but one language. That must be the language of the Declaration of Independence, of Washington’s Farewell address, of Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech and second inaugural.”
OFFICIAL ENGLISH
R’s linguistic tub-thumping long typified the tradition of American politics. That tradition began to change in the wake of the anything-goes attitudes and the celebration of cultural differences arising in the 1960s. A 1975 amendment to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 mandated the “bilingual ballot” under certain circumstances, notably when the voters of selected language groups reached five percent or more in a voting district. Bilingual education became a byword of educational thinking during the 1960s. By the 1970s linguists had demonstrated convincingly — at least to other academics — that black English (today called African-American vernacular English or Ebonics) was not “bad” English but a different kind of authentic English with its own rules. Predictably, there have been scattered demands that black English be included in bilingual-education programs.
It was against this background that the movement to make English the official language of the country arose. In 1981 Senator S. I. Hayakawa, long a leading critic of bilingual education and bilingual ballots, introduced in the U.S. Senate a constitutional amendment that not only would have made English the official language but would have prohibited federal and state laws and regulations requiring the use of other languages. His English Language Amendment died in the Ninety-seventh Congress.
In 1983 the organization called U.S. English was founded by Hayakawa and John Tanton, a Michigan ophthalmologist. The primary purpose of the organization was to promote English as the official language of the United States. (The best background readings on America’s “neolinguisticism” are the books Hold Your Tongue, by James Crawford, and Language Loyalties, edited by Crawford, both published in 1992.) Official English initiatives were passed by California in 1986, by Arkansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota, and South Carolina in 1987, by Colorado, Florida, and Arizona in 1988, and by Alabama in 1990. The majorities voting for these initiatives were generally not insubstantial: California’s, for example, passed by 73 percent.
It was probably inevitable that the Official English (or English Only — the two names are used almost interchangeably) movement would acquire a conservative, almost reactionary undertone in the 1990s. Official English is politically very incorrect. But its cofounder John Tanton brought with him strong liberal credentials. He had been active in the Sierra Club and Planned Parenthood, and in the 1970s served as the national president of Zero Population Growth. Early advisers of U.S. English resist ideological pigeonholing: they included Walter Annenberg, Jacques Barzun, Bruno Bettelheim, Alistair Cooke, Denton Cooley, Walter Cronkite, Angier Biddle Duke, George Gilder, Sidney Hook, Norman Podhoretz, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Karl Shapiro. In 1987 U.S. English installed as its president Linda Chávez, a Hispanic who had been prominent in the Reagan Administration. A year later she resigned her position, citing “repugnant” and “anti-Hispanic” overtones in an internal memorandum written by Tanton. Tanton, too, resigned, and Walter Cronkite, describing the affair as “embarrassing,” left the advisory board. One board member, Norman Cousins, defected in 1986, alluding to the “negative symbolic significance” of California’s Official English initiative, Proposition 63. The current chairman of the board and CEO of U.S. English is Mauro E. Mujica, who claims that the organization has 650,000 members.
The popular wisdom is that conservatives are pro and liberals con. True, conservatives such as George Will and William F. Buckley Jr. have written columns supporting Official English. But would anyone characterize as conservatives the present and past U.S. English board members Alistair Cooke, Walter Cronkite, and Norman Cousins? One of the strongest opponents of bilingual education is the Mexican-American writer Richard Rodríguez, best known for his eloquent autobiography, Hunger of Memory (1982). There is a strain of American liberalism that defines itself in nostalgic devotion to the melting pot.
For several years relevant bills awaited consideration in the U.S. House of Representatives. The Emerson Bill (H.R. 123), passed by the House last August, specifies English as the official language of government, and requires that the government “preserve and enhance” the official status of English. Exceptions are made for the teaching of foreign languages; for actions necessary for public health, international relations, foreign trade, and the protection of the rights of criminal defendants; and for the use of “terms of art” from languages other than English. It would, for example, stop the Internal Revenue Service from sending out income-tax forms and instructions in languages other than English, but it would not ban the use of foreign languages in census materials or documents dealing with national security. “E Pluribus Unum” can still appear on American money. U.S. English supports the bill.
What are the chances that some version of Official English will become federal law? Any language bill will face tough odds in the Senate, because some western senators have opposed English Only measures in the past for various reasons, among them a desire by Republicans not to alienate the growing number of Hispanic Republicans, most of whom are uncomfortable with mandated monolingualism. Texas Governor George W. Bush, too, has forthrightly said that he would oppose any English Only proposals in his state. Several of the Republican candidates for President in 1996 (an interesting exception is Phil Gramm) endorsed versions of Official English, as has Newt Gingrich. While governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton signed into law an English Only bill. As President, he has described his earlier action as a mistake.
Many issues intersect in the controversy over Official English: immigration (above all), the rights of minorities (Spanish-speaking minorities in particular), the pros and cons of bilingual education, tolerance, how best to educate the children of immigrants, and the place of cultural diversity in school curricula and in American society in general. The question that lies at the root of most of the uneasiness is this: Is America threatened by the preservation of languages other than English? Will America, if it continues on its traditional path of benign linguistic neglect, go the way of Belgium, Canada, and Sri Lanka — three countries among many whose unity is gravely imperiled by language and ethnic conflicts?
LANGUAGE
AND NATIONALITY
ANGUAGE and nationalism were not always so intimately intertwined. Never in the heyday of rule by sovereign was it a condition of employment that the King be able to speak the language of his subjects. George I spoke no English and spent much of his time away from England, attempting to use the power of his kingship to shore up his German possessions. In the Middle Ages nationalism was not even part of the picture: one owed loyalty to a lord, a prince, a ruler, a family, a tribe, a church, a piece of land, but not to a nation and least of all to a nation as a language unit. The capital city of the Austrian Hapsburg empire was Vienna, its ruler a monarch with effective control of peoples of the most varied and incompatible ethnicities, and languages, throughout Central and Eastern Europe. The official language, and the lingua franca as well, was German. While it stood — and it stood for hundreds of years — the empire was an anachronistic relic of what for most of human history had been the normal relationship between country and language: none.
The marriage of language and nationalism goes back at least to Romanticism and specifically to Rousseau, who argued in his Essay on the Origin of Languages that language must develop before politics is possible and that language originally distinguished nations from one another. A little-remembered aim of the French Revolution — itself the legacy of Rousseau — was to impose a national language on France, where regional languages such as Provençal, Breton, and Basque were still strong competitors against standard French, the French of the Ile de France. As late as 1789, when the Revolution began, half the population of the south of France, which spoke Provençal, did not understand French. A century earlier the playwright Racine said that he had had to resort to Spanish and Italian to make himself understood in the southern French town of Uzès. After the Revolution nationhood itself became aligned with language.
In 1846 Jacob Grimm, one of the Brothers Grimm of fairy-tale fame but better known in the linguistic establishment as a forerunner of modern comparative and historical linguists, said that “a nation is the totality of people who speak the same language.” After midcentury, language was invoked more than any other single criterion to define nationality. Language as a political force helped to bring about the unification of Italy and of Germany and the secession of Norway from its union with Sweden in 1905. Arnold Toynbee observed — unhappily — soon after the First World War that “the growing consciousness of Nationality had attached itself neither to traditional frontiers nor to new geographical associations but almost exclusively to mother tongues.”
The crowning triumph of the new desideratum was the Treaty of Versailles, in 1919, when the allied victors of the First World War began redrawing the map of Central and Eastern Europe according to nationality as best they could. The magic word was “self-determination,” and none of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points mentioned the word “language” at all. Self-determination was thought of as being related to “nationality,” which today we would be more likely to call “ethnicity”; but language was simpler to identify than nationality or ethnicity. When it came to drawing the boundary lines of various countries — Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Hungary, Albania, Bulgaria, Poland — it was principally language that guided the draftsman’s hand. (The main exceptions were Alsace-Lorraine, South Tyrol, and the German-speaking parts of Bohemia and Moravia.) Almost by default language became the defining characteristic of nationality.
And so it remains today. In much of the world, ethnic unity and cultural identification are routinely defined by language. To be Arab is to speak Arabic. Bengali identity is based on language in spite of the division of Bengali-speakers between Hindu India and Muslim Bangladesh. When eastern Pakistan seceded from greater Pakistan in 1971, it named itself Bangladesh: desa means “country”; bangla means not the Bengali people or the Bengali territory but the Bengali language.
Scratch most nationalist movements and you find a linguistic grievance. The demands for independence of the Baltic states (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia) were intimately bound up with fears for the loss of their respective languages and cultures in a sea of Russianness. In Belgium the war between French and Flemish threatens an already weakly fused country. The present atmosphere of Belgium is dark and anxious, costive; the metaphor of divorce is a staple of private and public discourse. The lines of terrorism in Sri Lanka are drawn between Tamil Hindus and Sinhalese Buddhists — and also between the Tamil and Sinhalese languages. Worship of the French language fortifies the movement for an independent Quebec. Whether a united Canada will survive into the twenty-first century is a question too close to call. Much of the anxiety about language in the United States is probably fueled by the “Quebec problem”: unlike Belgium, which is a small European country, or Sri Lanka, which is halfway around the world, Canada is our close neighbor.
Language is a convenient surrogate for nonlinguistic claims that are often awkward to articulate, for they amount to a demand for more political and economic power. Militant Sikhs in India call for a state of their own: Khalistan (”Land of the Pure” in Punjabi). They frequently couch this as a demand for a linguistic state, which has a certain simplicity about it, a clarity of motive — justice, even, because states in India are normally linguistic states. But the Sikh demands blend religion, economics, language, and retribution for sins both punished and unpunished in a country where old sins cast long shadows.
Language is an explosive issue in the countries of the former Soviet Union. The language conflict in Estonia has been especially bitter. Ethnic Russians make up almost a third of Estonia’s population, and most of them do not speak or read Estonian, although Russians have lived in Estonia for more than a generation. Estonia has passed legislation requiring knowledge of the Estonian language as a condition of citizenship. Nationalist groups in independent Lithuania sought restrictions on the use of Polish — again, old sins, long shadows.
In 1995 protests erupted in Moldova, formerly the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, over language and the teaching of Moldovan history. Was Moldovan history a part of Romanian history or of Soviet history? Was Moldova’s language Romanian? Moldovan — earlier called Moldavian — is Romanian, just as American English and British English are both English. But in the days of the Moldavian SSR, Moscow insisted that the two languages were different, and in a piece of linguistic nonsense required Moldavian to be written in the Cyrillic alphabet to strengthen the case that it was not Romanian.
The official language of Yugoslavia was Serbo-Croatian, which was never so much a language as a political accommodation. The Serbian and Croatian languages are mutually intelligible. Serbian is written in the Cyrillic alphabet, is identified with the Eastern Orthodox branch of the Catholic Church, and borrows its high-culture words from the east — from Russian and Old Church Slavic. Croatian is written in the Roman alphabet, is identified with Roman Catholicism, and borrows its high-culture words from the west — from German, for example, and Latin. One of the first things the newly autonomous Republic of Serbia did, in 1991, was to pass a law decreeing Serbian in the Cyrillic alphabet the official language of the country. With Croatia divorced from Serbia, the Croatian and Serbian languages are diverging more and more. Serbo-Croatian has now passed into history, a language-museum relic from the brief period when Serbs and Croats called themselves Yugoslavs and pretended to like each other.
Slovakia, relieved now of the need to accommodate to Czech cosmopolitan sensibilities, has passed a law making Slovak its official language. (Czech is to Slovak pretty much as Croatian is to Serbian.) Doctors in state hospitals must speak to patients in Slovak, even if another language would aid diagnosis and treatment. Some 600,000 Slovaks — more than 10 percent of the population — are ethnically Hungarian. Even staff meetings in Hungarian-language schools must be in Slovak. (The government dropped a stipulation that church weddings be conducted in Slovak after heavy opposition from the Roman Catholic Church.) Language inspectors are told to weed out “all sins perpetrated on the regular Slovak language.” Tensions between Slovaks and Hungarians, who had been getting along, have begun to arise.
The twentieth century is ending as it began — with trouble in the Balkans and with nationalist tensions flaring up in other parts of the globe. (Toward the end of his life Bismarck predicted that “some damn fool thing in the Balkans” would ignite the next war.) Language isn’t always part of the problem. But it usually is.
UNIQUE OTHERNESS
S there no hope for language tolerance? Some countries manage to maintain their unity in the face of multilingualism. Examples are Finland, with a Swedish minority, and a number of African and Southeast Asian countries. Two others could not be more unlike as countries go: Switzerland and India.
German, French, Italian, and Romansh are the languages of Switzerland. The first three can be and are used for official purposes; all four are designated “national” languages. Switzerland is politically almost hyperstable. It has language problems (Romansh is losing ground), but they are not major, and they are never allowed to threaten national unity.
Contrary to public perception, India gets along pretty well with a host of different languages. The Indian constitution officially recognizes nineteen languages, English among them. Hindi is specified in the constitution as the national language of India, but that is a pious postcolonial fiction: outside the Hindi-speaking northern heartland of India, people don’t want to learn it. English functions more nearly than Hindi as India’s lingua franca.
From 1947, when India obtained its independence from the British, until the 1960s blood ran in the streets and people died because of language. Hindi absolutists wanted to force Hindi on the entire country, which would have split India between north and south and opened up other fracture lines as well. For as long as possible Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first Prime Minister, resisted nationalist demands to redraw the capricious state boundaries of British India according to language. By the time he capitulated, the country had gained a precious decade to prove its viability as a union.
Why is it that India preserves its unity with not just two languages to contend with, as Belgium, Canada, and Sri Lanka have, but nineteen? The answer is that India, like Switzerland, has a strong national identity. The two countries share something big and almost mystical that holds each together in a union transcending language. That something I call “unique otherness.”
The Swiss have what the political scientist Karl Deutsch called “learned habits, preferences, symbols, memories, and patterns of landholding”: customs, cultural traditions, and political institutions that bind them closer to one another than to people of France, Germany, or Italy living just across the border and speaking the same language. There is Switzerland’s traditional neutrality, its system of universal military training (the “citizen army”), its consensual allegiance to a strong Swiss franc — and fondue, yodeling, skiing, and mountains. Set against all this, the fact that Switzerland has four languages doesn’t even approach the threshold of becoming a threat.
As for India, what Vincent Smith, in the Oxford History of India, calls its “deep underlying fundamental unity” resides in institutions and beliefs such as caste, cow worship, sacred places, and much more. Consider dharma, karma, and maya, the three root convictions of Hinduism; India’s historical epics; Gandhi; ahimsa (nonviolence); vegetarianism; a distinctive cuisine and way of eating; marriage customs; a shared past; and what the Indologist Ainslie Embree calls “Brahmanical ideology.” In other words, “We are Indian; we are different.”
Belgium and Canada have never managed to forge a stable national identity; Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia never did either. Unique otherness immunizes countries against linguistic destabilization. Even Switzerland and especially India have problems; in any country with as many different languages as India has, language will never not be a problem. However, it is one thing to have a major illness with a bleak prognosis; it is another to have a condition that is irritating and occasionally painful but not life-threatening.
History teaches a plain lesson about language and governments: there is almost nothing the government of a free country can do to change language usage and practice significantly, to force its citizens to use certain languages in preference to others, and to discourage people from speaking a language they wish to continue to speak. (The rebirth of Hebrew in Palestine and Israel’s successful mandate that Hebrew be spoken and written by Israelis is a unique event in the annals of language history.) Quebec has since the 1970s passed an array of laws giving French a virtual monopoly in the province. One consequence — unintended, one wishes to believe — of these laws is that last year kosher products imported for Passover were kept off the shelves, because the packages were not labeled in French. Wise governments keep their hands off language to the extent that it is politically possible to do so.
We like to believe that to pass a law is to change behavior; but passing laws about language, in a free society, almost never changes attitudes or behavior. Gaelic (Irish) is living out a slow, inexorable decline in Ireland despite enormous government support of every possible kind since Ireland gained its independence from Britain. The Welsh language, in contrast, is alive today in Wales in spite of heavy discrimination during its history. Three out of four people in the northern and western counties of Gwynedd and Dyfed speak Welsh.
I said earlier that language is a convenient surrogate for other national problems. Official English obviously has a lot to do with concern about immigration, perhaps especially Hispanic immigration. America may be threatened by immigration; I don’t know. But America is not threatened by language.
The usual arguments made by academics against Official English are commonsensical. Who needs a law when, according to the 1990 census, 94 percent of American residents speak English anyway? (Mauro E. Mujica, the chairman of U.S. English, cites a higher figure: 97 percent.) Not many of today’s immigrants will see their first language survive into the second generation. This is in fact the common lament of first-generation immigrants:their children are not learning their language and are losing the culture of their parents. Spanish is hardly a threat to English, in spite of isolated (and easily visible) cases such as Miami, New York City, and pockets of the Southwest and southern California. The everyday language of south Texas is Spanish, and yet south Texas is not about to secede from America.
But empirical, calm arguments don’t engage the real issue: language is a symbol, an icon. Nobody who favors a constitutional ban against flag burning will ever be persuaded by the argument that the flag is, after all, just a “piece of cloth.” A draft card in the 1960s was never merely a piece of paper. Neither is a marriage license.
Language, as one linguist has said, is “not primarily a means of communication but a means of communion.” Romanticism exalted language, made it mystical, sublime — a bond of national identity. At the same time, Romanticism created a monster: it made of language a means for destroying a country.
America has that unique otherness of which I spoke. In spite of all our racial divisions and economic unfairness, we have the frontier tradition, respect for the individual, and opportunity; we have our love affair with the automobile; we have in our history a civil war that freed the slaves and was fought with valor; and we have sports, hot dogs, hamburgers, and milk shakes — things big and small, noble and petty, important and trifling. “We are Americans; we are different.”
If I’m wrong, then the great American experiment will fail — not because of language but because it no longer means anything to be an American; because we have forfeited that “willingness of the heart” that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote was America; because we are no longer joined by Lincoln’s “mystic chords of memory.”
We are not even close to the danger point. I suggest that we relax and luxuriate in our linguistic richness and our traditional tolerance of language differences. Language does not threaten American unity. Benign neglect is a good policy for any country when it comes to language, and it’s a good policy for America.
Photographs by Mel Lindstrom

Copyright © 1997 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; April 1997; Should English B the Law?; Volume 279, No. 4; pages 55-64.

Family says English only way to win

By: Zeb Carabello, The Aurora Sentinel March 10, 2004
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=11102612&BRD=1947&PAG=461&dept_id=168657&rfi=6

The story of the Aguilar family is of a complicated plight rarely told but commonly lived amongst Aurora’s burgeoning, though often silent immigrant populations.
Yet true to their nature, the close-knit family of recent Guatemalan emmigrants is taking the intense issue of immigration and simplifying it in an honest message to their Aurora immigrant brethren: If you want to succeed, if you want a voice in this community - learn English.
“Too many immigrants don’t think they can do it or are afraid to ask,” said Vicky Aguilar, who along with husband Carlos, and children Gabby, 19; Carlos Jr., 18; and Pablo, 12; moved to Aurora from Guatemala in November 2002 knowing very little English. Fifteen months later, each of the Aguilars is now at least nearly fluent in English, enabling them to succeed in school and lead others in their community on the same path to conquering English.
“The immigrants here don’t know about the classes to learn English, there are a lot,” Vicky said. “I never thought I’d go to school again, but the teachers here make it easy. I tell people if I can learn English, they can also do it.”
Acquiring their new language at the grant-based Aurora Language Institute - an umbrella organization that includes more than 1,200 students enrolled in different levels of English instruction programs through the Community College of Aurora and several other local language services - the Aguilars are using their success to motivate other local immigrants to learn English.
Each family member except Pablo, a sixth-grade honor student at Prairie Middle School, is currently enrolled in varying levels of the Aurora Language Institute. Carlos Jr. and Gabby have become so comfortable with English that they are now both full-time students at CCA, while Vicky is taking computer classes at the college and volunteering to help lower-level ESL students.
Carlos senior is the only member of the family who hasn’t advanced to classes at CCA’s English Language Institute, although he spends six hours a week improving his English skills at the Aurora Language Institute’s Lowry campus.
“This is an amazing family to accomplish what they have in such a short time here,” said Maria Halloran, director of CCA’s English Language Institute. “They are already looked up to in the community, inspiring people who have been here 25 years without learning English to sign up for classes.”
The Spanish-language pastor at Living Hope Community Church, Carlos Sr. and his family came to Aurora at the request of one of the church’s missionaries he worked with closely at a charity organization near the Aguilar’s native Amatitlan, Guatemala.
Since taking over pastoral duties at the church, which uses North Middle School for its services, Carlos and Vicky have been successful in convincing at least seven other immigrant families in the area to begin English language programs through the Aurora Language Institute, Carlos Sr. said.
Carlos Sr. is here on a religious visa, and is the only member of the family with a social security number or allowed to work. The family has applied for temporary residency visas but has yet to be accepted.
The lack of residency visas means the family cannot apply for financial aid at CCA, and because none except Carlos can legally work, the rest of the family stays busy volunteering. However, the lack of income limits what the family can do.
Pablo, for instance, was recently selected by his advanced math teacher to attend the national Young Leadership Conference in Washington, D.C., but he had to turn down the invite due to the program’s $1,500 price tag.
Carlos Jr. has created websites for several programs at CCA, although he has not been able to accept money for his work.
But the family says the daily red tape is just part of being new immigrants, and the Aguilars are confident that their dedication to learning English will create future opportunities to become full-time citizens.
“It’s very hard for a lot of immigrants, without credit you can’t get any insurance, a license - not even a cell phone,” said Carlos Jr., who credits his quick grasp of English to the many hours he spent watching subtitled ESPN and HBO growing up in Guatemala. “That’s why I think it’s been important for us to learn English as fast as we can, because now we communicate with the many people from other cultures that live here, and learn how to live better here.”
For information on bilingual programs at the Aurora Language Center call 303-340-7552.
©Aurora Sentinel 2004

WHY THE US NEEDS AN OFFICIAL LANGUAGE!!!
by Mauro E. Mujica

Recent polls show that the WORLD believes in the importance of learning English. It may be time to tell Americans this.

In June, the Pew Research Center announced the results of an extensive survey on global trends such as the spread of democracy, globalization, and technology. Titled “Views of a Changing World,” it was conducted from 2001 to 2003 and polled 66,000 people from 50 countries. The survey received some publicity in the United States, mainly because it showed that anti-American sentiments were on the upswing around the world. Less publicized was the fact that there is a now a global consensus on the need to learn English.

One question in the Pew survey asked respondents to agree or disagree with the statement “Children need to learn English to succeed in the world today.” Many nations showed almost unanimous agreement on the importance of learning English. Examples include Vietnam, 98 percent; Indonesia, 96 percent; Germany and South Africa, 95 percent; India, 93 percent; China and the Philippines, 92 percent; Honduras, Japan, Nigeria, and Uganda, 91 percent; and France, Mexico, and Ukraine, 90 percent.
To an immigrant like myself (from Chile), these results come as no surprise. Parents around the world know that English is the global language and that their children need to learn it to succeed. English is the language of business, higher education, diplomacy, aviation, the Internet, science, popular music, entertainment, and international travel. All signs point to its continued acceptance across the planet.
Given the globalization of English, one might be tempted to ask why the United States would need to declare English its official language. Why codify something that is happening naturally and without government involvement?

THE RETREAT OF ENGLISH

n fact, even as it spreads across the globe, English is on the retreat in vast sections of the United States. Our government makes it easy for immigrants to function in their native languages through bilingual education, multilingual ballots and driver’s license exams, and government-funded translators in schools and hospitals. Providing most essential services to immigrants in their native languages is expensive for American taxpayers and also keeps immigrants linguistically isolated.
Historically, the need to speak and understand English has served as an important incentive for immigrants to learn the language and assimilate into the mainstream of American society. For the last 30 years, this idea has been turned on its head. Expecting immigrants to learn English has been called “racist.” Marta Jimenez, an attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, speaks of “the historical use of English in the United States as a tool of oppression.”
Groups such as the National Association for Bilingual Education complain about the “restrictive goal” of having immigrant children learn in English. The former mayor of Miami, Maurice Ferre, dismissed the idea of even a bilingual future for his city. “We’re talking about Spanish as a main form of communication, as an official language,” he averred. “Not on the way to English.”

Perhaps this change is best illustrated in the evolving views of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). Started in 1929, the group was originally pro-English and pro-assimilation. One of the founding aims and purposes of LULAC was “to foster the acquisition and facile use of the Official Language of our country that we may hereby equip ourselves and our families for the fullest enjoyment of our rights and privileges and the efficient discharge of our duties and obligations to this, our country.” By the 1980s the executive director of LULAC, Arnoldo Torres, could proudly proclaim, “We cannot assimilate and we won’t!”
The result of this is that the United States has a rapidly growing population of people–often native born–who are not proficient in English. The 2000 Census found that 21.3 million Americans (8 percent of the population) are classified as “limited English proficient,” a 52 percent increase from 1990 and more than double the 1980 total. More than 5 million of these people were born in the United States.
Citing census statistics gives an idea of how far English is slipping in America, but it does not show how this is played out in everyday life. Consider the following examples:
lThe New York Times reports that Hispanics account for over 40 percent of the population of Hartford, Connecticut, and that the city is becoming “Latinized.” Last year, Eddie Perez became Hartford’s first Hispanic mayor. The city Web page is bilingual, and after-hours callers to the mayor’s office are greeted by a message in Spanish. Half of Hartford’s Hispanics do not speak English. According to Freddy Ortiz, who owns a bakery in the city, “In the bank, they speak Spanish; at the hospital, they speak Spanish; my bakery suppliers are starting to speak Spanish. Even at the post office, they are Americans, but they speak Spanish.” Even Mayor Perez notes that “we’ve become a Latin city, so to speak. It’s a sign of things to come.”
lIn May, about 20 percent of the students at Miami Senior High School, where 88 percent of the students speak English as a second language, failed the annual Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) exam, which is required for graduation. The poor results prompted protests and demands for the test to be given in Spanish as well as English. Over 200 students and teachers gathered outside the school waving signs and chanting “No FCAT.” A state senator from Miami introduced a bill that would allow the FCAT to be given in Spanish.
lJust a day before the Pew survey was released, Gwinnett County in Georgia announced it will provide its own staff translators for parents of students who speak Spanish, Korean, and Vietnamese. The school board approved $138,000 for the new translators despite a tight budget. Donna Robertson, a principal at an elementary school in the county, claimed the translators are only a short-term solution. The real solution, she claims, is a multilingual school staff. There are 46 languages spoken among students in Gwinnett County.
lIn May, a poll taken by NBC News and the Sun-Sentinel newspaper of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, found 83 percent of Hispanics in south Florida agreeing that “it is easy to get along day in and day out without speaking English well/at all.”

THE COSTS OF MULTILINGUALISM

ultilingual government is not cheap. Bilingual education alone is estimated to cost taxpayers billions of dollars per year. The federal government has spent over $100 million to study the effectiveness of bilingual education, only to discover that it is less effective at teaching English than English immersion programs are. Much of the cost for court and school translators, multilingual voting ballots, and multiple document translations is picked up at the local level. Even during good economic times, this is a burden. In lean years it is a budget breaker, taking funds away from education, health care, transportation, and police and fire services.

For example, Los Angeles County spent $3.3 million, 15 percent of the entire election budget, to print election ballots in seven languages and hire multilingual poll workers for the March 2002 primary. The county also spends $265 per day for each of 420 full-time court interpreters. San Francisco spends $350,000 per each language that documents must be translated into under its bilingual government ordinance. Financial officials in Washington, D.C., estimate that a proposed language access would cost $7.74 million to implement. The bill would require all city agencies to hire translators and translate official documents for any language spoken by over 500 non-English-speaking people in the city.
The health-care industry, already reeling from a shortage of nurses and the costs of treating the uninsured, was dealt another blow by President Clinton. Executive Order 13166 was signed into law on August 11, 2000. The order requires private physicians, clinics, and hospitals that accept Medicare and Medicaid to provide, at their own expense, translators for any language spoken by any patient. The cost of an interpreter can exceed the reimbursement of a Medicare or Medicaid visit by 13 times–costing doctors as much as $500 per translator.
Of course, there are also nonmonetary costs associated with a multilingual America. These expenses often have a human cost.
A 22-year-old immigrant won a $71 million settlement because a group of paramedics and doctors misdiagnosed a blood clot in his brain. The man’s relatives used the Spanish word intoxicado to describe his ailment. They meant he was nauseated, but the translator interpreted the word to mean intoxicated.
Six children were killed when a loose tailgate from a tractor trailer fell off on a Milwaukee highway. The driver of the family’s SUV could not avoid the tailgate, which punctured the gas tank and caused the vehicle to explode. An investigation found that other truckers had tried to warn the driver of the tractor trailer about his loose tailgate, but the driver did not understand English.
An immigrant in Orange County, California, died from a fall into a 175-degree vat of chemicals at an Anaheim metal-plating shop. Though the company’s instructions clearly forbade walking on the five-inch rail between tanks, they were printed in English, a language that the worker did not understand. An inquiry into the accident found that many of the recent hires were not proficient in English.
Hispanics accounted for nearly one-third of Georgia’s workplace deaths in 2000, despite making up only 5.3 percent of the state’s population. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, a branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, blamed “misunderstandings arising from language barriers” for the deaths and said they “could be prevented and don’t have to happen.”

THE DIS-UNITED STATES

e need only look to Canada to see the problems a multilingual society can bring. America’s northern neighbor faces a severe constitutional crisis over the issue of language. In 1995, the predominately French-speaking
Various Views of English

According to a Pew survey, many nations showed almost unanimous agreement on the importance of learning English.

In fact, English is on the retreat in vast sections of the United States.

The government makes it easy for immigrants to function in their native languages through bilingual education, multilingual ballots and driver’s license exams, and government-funded translators in schools and hospitals.

Providing most essential services to immigrants in their native languages is expensive for American taxpayers, and also keeps immigrants linguistically isolated.

The result is that the United States has a rapidly growing population of people–often native born–who are not proficient in English.
province of Quebec came within a few thousand votes of seceding from Canada. The secessionist Parti Qu‚b‚cois ruled the province until this year. The national government must cater to Quebec to preserve order and maintain a cohesive government. This has spurred secessionist movements in English-speaking western Canada on the grounds that the Canadian government favors French speakers.
Of course, battles over language rage across the globe, but since Canada is so similar, it offers the most instructive warning for the United States. While the policy of official multilingualism has led to disunity, resentment, and near-secession, it is also very costly. Canada’s dual-language requirement costs approximately $260 million each year. Canada has one-tenth the population of the United States and spent that amount accommodating only two languages. A similar language policy would cost the United States much more than $4 billion annually, as we have a greater population and many more languages to accommodate.
Unless the United States changes course, it is clearly on the road to a Canadian-style system of linguistic encla

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